


linger

by theformerone



Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst, Blood and Violence, Cannibal Inner Sakura, Cannibalism, Dark, F/M, I'm so sorry guys but tis the season amirite?, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Inner Sakura is a kekkei genkai, Revenge killing, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-27
Updated: 2019-09-27
Packaged: 2020-10-29 01:37:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20788439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theformerone/pseuds/theformerone
Summary: There was something that sat dormant in her. Only scratched awake when it needed feeding. It didn't bother her so much in her genin days. It had been well fed during the war. Now it wanted.for shikasaku day 4, rust between my teeth but still i smile





	linger

**Author's Note:**

> title stolen from linger by the cranberries. which honestly, is the whole vibe of this fic.

The heavy weight of it means little against Shikamaru's shoulders. He's carried full grown stags across clearings to get them medical attention, had to deadlift a pregnant doe heavy with twins so one fawn could slide out with his upward momentum.

The weight doesn't bother him much at all. 

She is down below, he knows this already. Shikamaru had been told to dispatch the trafficker on his way out, or leave one of the clean-up crews to do it. ANBU wasn't the best place for a shinobi with an itchy hand. Shikamaru isn't. But she is. Then again, that's why she works at the hospital, birthing babies and healing toddlers instead. 

You'd never believe it if you just looked at her. 

All shinobi got strange over time. That was just par for the course. It would be bad form _not _to expect it. Shikamaru buried his angst in cigarettes and long conversations at his father's forest grave. Sometimes he poked the eyes out of Hidan's skull in the bowels of Nara territory, just to exert a bit of control against something that could give under his hand. 

She's different. She's not like him. 

She folds herself up in her jewel toned scrubs, her soft canvas shoes, the little hairclips that her younger patients give her holding her bangs out of her eyes. She sticks in pediatrics, but is also a gifted gynecologist. She spots cysts faster than anyone, and she's the most reliable pregnancy test this side of Hot Spring Country. 

She's testing the edge of her battle axe against her finger when he arrives. Her eyes are narrowed, gauging how much pressure is required to pull blood. Her focus only falters when the solid rock wall comes up behind him, and he drops his offering at her feet. 

Here, Sakura looks like some kind of spirit of medicine, some kind of minor goddess of healing and mercy. But a feral little smile curls over her lips as she gazes over the body of the man slumped on their floor. 

"Let me guess," she murmurs. "He was mean to orphans."

Her eyes like green shards of glass flick to him; Shikamaru feels cut. 

"That's always it," she coos. "Someone who hurt the kids, so someone who made Naruto sad."

She pulls a pair of two sai off of the walls and moves, catlike and fluid towards the man, still unconscious, but not so for long.

"But Naruto won't do anything about it, can't do anything about it, because he's the sunshine Nanadaime," Sakura says, crouching low and dragging the man's left hand out. She holds his wrist down, and Shikamaru watches, lets himself watch as she buries the weapon into it, and then in the ground under it.

The man roars awake, but no one will hear him here. This man is the brains of the operation. Only strong with muscle around him. Good with numbers, low empathy; fine with trading children away as long as it made his bottom line. Opium was his habit. That and power. Rubbing elbows with other famous child abusers. It all came back around.

He can hear it when Sakura's stomach starts to rumble. It almost seems unrefined.

"And _Sasuke's_ too busy to worry over worldly petty things like this," Sakura places the other sai in the man's right wrist, pinning him to the ground, a bit more sturdy than the palm, "so you bring the mess to me, and I make it go away."

She says this as she flicks a wisp of hair off of her mouth. It splays across her cheek. The man kicks hard, but he isn't strong enough to do anything other than scream. Sakura tugs a pair of used blue sanitized gloves out of her pocket and shoves them into the man's mouth. 

"You're going to make me clean for prints again," he grumbles, pulling a cigarette from behind his ear and lighting up. 

Sakura looks up at him, her eyes finally starting to go a little more wild toward the pupil. Less cold, less curt. She's happy to have something wiggling. She's been waiting for a while, he knows. Not much to do in peacetime, but the black market was a present threat. The sudden decrease in the number of the world's shinobi had pushed towards a worldwide rise in crime, especially child trafficking. 

She blows him a kiss, laving her tongue over her lower lip. 

"You can clean me up after, too, if you want."

Shikamaru doesn't understand what this other side of her is. But it's there. Present. Hiding deep inside of her when she's out in the world with Naruto and Sasuke and Kakashi. Slightly different for when she doted on Ino, different again when she went to spend time with her shishou and her senpai. 

Haruno Sakura had many faces. Always accommodating, rarely impolite. A good girl, by all rights. 

She was also this. 

She lifts a foot and stands over the man writhing and kicking beneath her. He's screaming, swearing at her through the gloves. It's clear he wants to spit them out, but it's also the only thing keeping him from biting off his own tongue. 

Sakura drops down to one knee and then the other, still riding high above the man even as he thrashes, his wrists bound, in agony. Her eyes flick up to Shikamaru. She watches him. Her gaze is heavier than the body Shikamaru dragged down the stairs. She is wild, but perfectly controlled. All power, tight pent up aggression, heady-behind-her-eyes _something _lighting her up in black from within. 

There was something that sat dormant in her. Only scratched awake when it needed feeding. It didn't bother her so much in her genin days. It had been well fed during the war. Now it _wanted_. 

He stands by because he can't not watch. This thing that only she seems able to do. This _gift_ she only brings out in the cover of night. Shikamaru likes to see how it unfolds inside of her, like something slowly coming out. A flower blooming into itself, smothering itself to death. 

He feels her eyes on him. He waits while she watches, tracks the smoke curl into the air, takes in his lax posture, the way he hasn't moved except to light his cigarette, and to complain about the mess she was about to make. 

She liked the way it felt on her fingers. 

She's strong enough to do it with her hands, but she wants more of a show than that. Shikamaru can tell. This part of her is a narcissist, wants attention, craves it, starves for it. Part of the lonely childhood. Part of being rejected by every reaching hand except for Ino's. Part of being passed over. Sakura had internalized it, placed it somewhere else. It latched onto something else inside her, and they grew together, like twin cherries.

She uses a senbon, which is clever of her. The wounds won't be consistent with anything that matches her damage index. The way it was supposed to be. She would've been great in ANBU, but she could get away with a lot more here. 

"Do you wanna know what I'd do with you?"

She tips the senbon in at the base of his throat, and the man wails. He's babbling, probably praying, but Sakura drags the needle down with the smooth force of a surgeon. She cuts him open like a fish. 

The smell of blood blooms into the air like a ripe fruit at the end of summer, rotten and sweet, hot and coppery. It mixes with the clove smell of Shikamaru's cigarette, and fills this murder hole he's carved her in the cliffs behind the village. 

"You gonna tell me anyway?" 

She smiles, using her own back leg to snap the man's femur when his bucking and flailing get to be too much. The sound is rather like the sound of a piece of pocky being snapped in two. That is how precise she is, even now. "Not if you don't want me to."

They don't speak much outside of this. That is the appeal of this side of her. Shikamaru only sees her when there's a body Naruto can't legally touch, but is still in Konoha's hands, however off-the-books. Sometimes, it was his job to spit people back out into the world, only a little roughened up after they had been spirited out of it. 

Sometimes, it was his job to spit people into Sakura. 

"I imagine breaking your legs," she says, ripping open the man's abdominal cavity with her slender, little hands. Fingers that could've played the shamisen, or fluttered over a flute. She peels flesh away from bone until the ribcage puffs up before her. "I'd use your thighs to make a stew that could last us through the winter. I would use your bones to carve you antlers."

The man's internal organs writhe out and Sakura tugs them on their way. The man has finally gone into shock, and though he is unconscious, his body still gives the occasional spasm. Not dead yet. 

"I'd keep you in here, in the dark," Sakura continues. She looks up at him, her fists deep in the man's belly. She doesn't so much as blink when she crushes his ribs in her fingers to get to his heart. There's blood on her face, marring her Byakugō, but she looks more than serene. She seems like she's floating. "I know you like it in the dark."

Her voice sends a spark of heat through him, and Shikamaru sucks hard on his cigarette. He doesn't like that she's got him so easily pegged. He doesn't like that she knows he likes to watch. 

Not what she does. But her. Watch her do it. Pick a body apart like it's made of sticks and clay. 

"What're you going to use from him?"

Sakura doesn't even look down at the body. Shikamaru can tell by how she adjusts herself on the man's stomach that she's pleased he's speaking to her so much. He normally keeps quiet. Doesn't like what this does to him. Doesn't like how curious he is about it. Doesn't like how he wants to investigate it. 

He imagines some stones are better left unturned. 

"Anything the opium hasn't ruined," She's got her hand around his heart, and she's pumping it herself. Just like she did for Naruto during the war. Shikamaru wonders if this is how she practiced before she had to do it in real life. That wouldn't surprise him. "If the organ meat is bad, he's lean, even if he can't fight. I can pull a steak out of him."

Her jaw goes slack as she squeezes his heart, digs her fingers into its slippery wet flesh, holds it, punctures it, drives her fingers to meet themselves through it. The heart tries feebly, and thumps against her hand. She smothers it in one fist, then smiles. 

"Did your mother ever have you eat motsu?" she asks. "Mine did. We could make horumonyaki. We just need a charcoal fire. We could do that on top of shishou's head, if you like."

He closes his eyes, lets the idea bump around in his mind. 

"I like horumon nabe," she muses. Her wrist begins to glow with chakra, and with expert mutilation, she cuts the heart, mangled, free from its chambers. "Hot pot is the best this time of year."

She holds the feeble thing up to her mouth. Shikamaru's eyes are open. Sakura's eyes go black as nothing, white at the pupil. Blood smears across her mouth; it's easier to think that than to see her take the bite.

**Author's Note:**

> maybe inner sakura is part of a hidden kekkei genkai that gives sakura incredible bloodlust and killer instinct but only if she eats human flesh
> 
> happy prehalloween xx


End file.
